


the lovely wheel

by pseudocitrus



Category: Tokyo Ghoul, Tokyo Ghoul:re
Genre: F/M, Gap Filler, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Non-Explicit Sex, Touken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 12:30:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8144131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudocitrus/pseuds/pseudocitrus
Summary: Touka, and Kaneki, and the mess that remains after escaping Cochlea.





	

**Author's Note:**

> an indulgent hurt/comfort touken small re: cochlea events~~ (the most recent chapter at the time of this writing is 94.) 
> 
> hope you're having a good day!

When they make it out, it’s dark.

 _Home_ , she thinks. _We have to get home_.

:re is large enough for all of them, and her blood is drumming, and for just a couple breaths she allows herself to hope. But just as they clear the final exit Touka makes direct eye contact with the glint of a security camera, and she grits her teeth as all her optimism dissolves.

Once they’re far enough away from the sirens to hear each other, the parties split into groups determined solely by who can carry who. To each party she passes hurried instructions to the safe house, reciting different predetermined paths for everyone, and watches as Nii-san and her brother are carried off in opposite directions by people in white coats.

“They’ll be fine,” says a voice behind her which belongs, almost certainly, to Kaneki Ken. She can almost see the shine of his hair, pale again, at her vision’s periphery.

She doesn’t look fully at him. Even in the aftermath of all this bloody fighting, even after having faced the Reaper herself, even with their lives still on the line, there’s a part of her still knotted up with a different type of fear that, comparatively, is pretty pathetic.

“It’s this way,” she says, not quite saying _follow me_ or _let’s go._

But his footsteps join all the rest.

:::

At the safe house, the two beds are given to Nii-san and Ayato. Touka digs up a futon for Hinami, who promptly collapses onto it. Banjou takes over from there, with urgency, and Touka’s body, worn already to the marrow, somehow finds some last reserve of energy to empty and distribute the safe house’s stores of bandages and meat.

“We can handle it from here,” one of the white coats tells Touka when she retrieves the last item from the last shelf, and Touka looks at them. Her mind clears up just enough to whisper to her the realization that this person is wearing exactly the coat that Arima does, if not several sizes smaller. They smile at her, nervously.

“Please…please help yourself to some rest? You, um…look very tired too, nee-san.”

In the end, it’s Banjou that has to swoop in and move Touka to another futon hastily rolled out beside Hinami’s prone body. Hinami and Ayato and Nii-san are so swaddled in bandages they look like a trio of cocoons. Touka fails in giving the rest of the room a quick scan but she doesn’t see white hair and anyway Banjou is finishing wrapping up one of her arms, which she now realizes is throbbing considerably, and then he practically shoves her between the sheets.

“Sleep,” he says, but by that time, Touka is already out.

:::

Her dreams are filled with lightning.

A bolt of it, red as blood, shatters near her feet with a sound like a shattering quinque and a woman’s scream, and Touka jerks awake, with tears. She swipes at her eyes with bandaged-up fingers and gazes around the room with panic, every nerve electrified.

 _DOVES_ — well, no — well, yes. The white coats are being used as blankets by their owners, who are sleeping against each other on a far wall.

 _Don’t look,_ she tells herself, but it’s no use — her eyes are already scanning again, finding more bodies dozing around the room — slumped at the table, beside discarded gas masks — leaning against walls — curled up in corners. Somehow, even a woman wearing the same dress as Hinami, as well as a small dog, both managed to make it in here.

 _Don’t,_ she tells herself, but it’s too late. Her body made its decision for her, searched every figure for pale hair and didn’t find it.

Her heart is racing. She takes breaths to calm it, lies down and tries to catch some form of sleep again. It can’t have been more than a few hours. But the blanket around her feels suddenly like a net, and she throws it off, and stands.

:::

In their long search, every safe house had some problem or other. Out of all of the ones they furnished, this one was the only one that both she and Nii-san agreed on completely.

Touka exits. In the illumination of distant streetlights, she feels around for the ladder, and climbs.

It’s slow-going; she takes it easy, with her arm. As she ascends, the busier parts of the city in the distance begin to glitter, beautifully; the wind combs through her hair, with a fresh and invigorating chill. The city spreads out around her, with its winking lights in the windows. From this height, it’s easy for her to imagine each of them, even the dark ones, belonging to a different family, warm and safe for the night.

:::

She could say that she wasn’t expecting it, but the truth is that some stupid part of her hoped anyway, and that’s why, when she reaches the small rooftop, she pauses, to double-check, to affirm reality.

Pale hair. A wan smile.

Kaneki’s voice is soft.

“Hi…Touka-chan.”

:::

“I can go,” Kaneki says, after a moment, and Touka says, “Don’t.”

“If you…if you want to stay, I mean,” she amends. “Don’t…don’t go if you don’t want to.”

:::

“I’m going to sit here,” she says, like a warning, and Kaneki shifts around. For a moment she thinks he’s about to stand, but then he makes sweeps his blanket aside and makes room for her beside him.

Touka sits.

:::

There are some centimeters between them, but even so, the wind’s chill seems to have less effect. She makes herself maintain her breathing, and fumbles in vain for anything to say. While Kaneki was moving around earlier she heard a strange, sharp scrabbling noise, and because she can’t bring herself to look properly at his face she looks down at his…hands.

“I made them,” Kaneki says, noticing her gaze. He laughs, weakly, fluttering the fingers, which seem correctly numbered and proportioned but otherwise weirdly colored. “I guess I should…I don’t know. Eat something.”

His stomach grumbles as if with irritated agreement, and Kaneki poses the hand into a grip on top of it, soothing.

“All the food went to Ayato and Nii-san and everyone else,” Touka says, with some apology. “And the other safe houses don’t have any.”

“That’s okay,” Kaneki says. “I don’t…I don’t really need it. Not compared to them.”

“It’s good you made it,” Touka says. “Past the Reaper, I mean. I knew you could.”

He scuffs the edge of the roof with one heel. “Yeah.”

It’s been a long time since they last really spoke or interacted, and still she can tell that he looks miserable.

:::

It’s stupid, really. The weeks that he spent at Anteiku are nothing compared to years at the CCG. This thought occurs to her, for reasons she tries not to parse.

They look down at the city together in silence. In the distance there’s already the faintest glow, a dim threat of the oncoming day. In the light, all their uncertainties will be forced to wake. Where do they go next? What do they do now?

“I’m sorry,” Kaneki says suddenly.

“It’s alright,” Touka tells him.

“No, I really mean it. I’m —”

“It’s,” Touka says, “alright.”

:::

She risks a glance over at him, and sees that he is looking at her too. His eyes are reddened, and there are clear tear tracks on his face, and something must change in her expression because he blinks a little and looks away and starts scrubbing at himself with those hands of his and muttering, “Sorry, sorry,” and the limbs are so scaly they are scratching up his face, and Touka grabs his wrists and pries them away.

“Will you stop,” she snaps, but there’s a sort of quiver in her voice when she says it, and when their eyes finally meet again fully Touka’s vision blurs and she feels her face crumple.

“I’m sorry too,” she bursts suddenly. “The truth is, I tried to make a place for — for you. So that one day you’d be able to…”

Her voice is really breaking up now, but she can’t stop. “I…I d-did my best, but I…at Cochlea, they saw all of our faces, so, I…” She takes a breath. “They’ll find it, they’ll destroy everything. And the more I think about it, I don’t…I don’t think…that you, or me, or anyone —”

_We’ll never have a place._

It hits her all at once, the breadth of her stupidity, her exhaustion, her weakness. The glint of the Reaper’s glasses and the crunch and slime of ghoul bodies in the depths of Cochlea, the many days she spent gathering books for the cafe shelves, the lightning that all at once is razor-sharp and as soft as a bedroom light, the smoke bellowing out of Anteiku, Nii-san’s last nod to her before they slipped on their masks and the gaping hole in his midsection, Ayato fighting alongside her as they used to and being exploded into pieces, and then, before she knows it a sound is coming out of her, a terrible and broken and hopeless noise, and Kaneki grabs her, and she hides her face against his chest and sobs, and sobs, and sobs.

:::

His arms wrap around her, tightly; his legs shift around her, and she curls into the space made for her, finds his body somewhere in the mess of blanket and clothes and clutches him, nails digging into fabric. He’s warm and solid, and despite her sorrow then she can’t help the tiniest saccharine stab as he threshes his fingers through her hair and nestles her against his own shaking body.

 _Stupid,_ she thinks. She’s barely seen him for years and the first thing she does is cry like a baby to someone who is essentially a stranger, a person who probably only barely cared about her and most certainly didn’t fight his way out of Cochlea and defeat the CCG’s greatest just to coddle her. And what kind of comfort could she, a ghoul who he had completely forgotten, possibly give?

But she can’t help it. Her hold tightens, trying to stabilize herself as much as she tries to stabilize him, and as her breath begins to steady she inhales his scent over and over until the foreign pieces in it, the Dove uniform and the scales and the three years of change become simply air.

:::

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Breathe in.

:::

It happens, then — at the very pit of it — right when she’s upturned herself and shaken out, finally, every single droplet inside her. She stirs, raising her head, and finds him looking back at her again, eyes glassy. If he’s going to run away again, if he’s going to leave and fight again, he isn’t going to do it now.

They’re so close, and her body so rough and so hollow, that the decision is made for her rather than by her. Her mouth opens, and she does what any ghoul would, trapped with a completely empty belly and with sustenance dangling right before her face —

She leans, and, gently, kisses him.

:::

Years.

She’d by lying if she said she never imagined this moment, and lying still if she admitted that any iteration of it came even close to the bright, heated bloom in her belly when Kaneki opens his mouth and kisses her back, with just as much desperation. Her head, already too delicately tethered, lightens and floats away completely, leaving her body to pursue its cravings with unfiltered abandon.

It’s different, to desire flesh this way, to taste him and feel her belly swell not with food but with something better, butterflies and soothing warmth and lights that flicker up and down her spine. The illumination chases away the shadows inside her and she rearranges her legs around him, draws herself closer, closer, trying to smother it out completely. He sighs shakily against her and fabric tears and she sees patches of his smooth skin flare with goosebumps before she covers him with her own body, sheltering, relishing. His shivering against her takes a different quality, and she feels it deep in her chest like low music.

Starvation is hell, and they are hungry. Touka kisses him over and over, reveling in the salt of his tears and the sweetness of his shudders as her hands move across him. He feels her back, leaving pale streaks where his nails caress with too much ardor, and every marking burns deliciously. They stroke and clench and share quiet pleas and louder moans and as she squeezes around him the echoing gape of her emptied body starts to fill, fill, fill.

:::

It’s too fast, too soon. She wants to linger and already the two of them are spent all over again, as raw as wounds. Gently, Kaneki frees the blanket from where it’s tangled up between them and draws it over the both of them, bandaging them up, tucking them in.

“It’s alright,” Kaneki says, and Touka realizes that she was about to protest. Gold is beginning to tinge the clouds, the very top of distant skyscrapers.

“We should —”

“It’s,” Kaneki says, “alright.”

Silence, then, except for the wind.

“What are we going to do?” Touka asks. It’s a selfish question, broader, maybe, than anyone could answer. Kaneki doesn’t look at her, but not out of any shame. He scratches his face but his finger doesn’t even come close to his chin.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But I…”

His voice quiets, like he’s embarrassed to say it aloud.

“I want to live.”

:::

There’s something touching, probably, about watching the sun come up together. As it is, Touka falls asleep almost immediately, and sees none of it.

But in her dreams, the skies are clear and blue.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! let me know if you liked it :)


End file.
